BNakagawa

CBA expires soon, so the universal DH might be on the table, which would double the number of potential landing spots for Ohtani.

despite all the possible tiebreaking scenarios, the AL wildcard race ended in the most predictable and boring way possible, with BoSox and Yankees fending off the Mariners and BlueJays.  After Tuesday's game, one or the other of the usual suspects will fall by the wayside and then we'll wait to see if the defending WS champs from the truncated 2020 season are one and done.

The Giants just extended Brandon Crawford, so signing an expensive freeagent like Story doesn't make much sense.

The SFGiants win game 107 and the NL West on game 162, setting a record for the most wins by any team that clinched its division on the last day of the regular season.

Starting pitcher Logan Webb went 7+ innings, scoring 3 runs and driving in 2 with his first three at bats. the Designated Hitter is for weaklings.

I voted "Didn't play until restrictions were eased enough to allow meetups" but I did play some pathfinder online during the pandemic. It was better than nothing, I guess.

another statistical anomaly of 2021. The Mets spent 103 days in first place in the NL East and are going to miss the playoffs and end up with a losing record.

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/2021-mets-make-wrong-kind-of-history-by-clinching-losing-season/

The Giants won their 104th game of 2021, setting a franchise record for the SFGiants era and they still haven't clinched the division yet.

1 hour ago, Greywind said:

Kudzu?

Black Lotus, earth-616

Our current teen hero game features a school within a school, with two rival schools, each with metahumans mixed into the student bodies, a team of trainee level villains sponsored by a master villain, multiple sets of Viper operatives, independant villain teams and personal rivals, hunteds and family business, so there's no shortage of angles to pursue. (granted, we're not using Ravenswood Academy) The setting is in New York City, so the population density of metahumans makes perfect sense. A setting out in the sticks, relatively speaking, puts some limitations on the GM, but limitations make for better art IMO.

https://www.wired.com/story/anonymous-leaked-data-from-right-wing-web-host-epik/

1 hour ago, dsatow said:

One of the reason I asked this question is I was remembering at a Con using agents in a game which were compared to the the heroes just Kobolds swarming the area.  Players seemed to take great glee and wiping the map with them before taking on the larger menace.

were they human hirelings or robots or what? If they were humans, I'd have some thoughts about the players' mindsets...

My $0.02: Pick four random villains from an enemies sourcebook. You take one and pass the others to your players. Pick teams at random and fight. Test drive the system using rented rides, so when you break something, you don't feel any regrets. It's also a good way to find out if you like this kind of character or not. 

Hayabusa - japanese for Peregrine Falcon (the world's fastest bird)

On 8/19/2021 at 4:12 AM, Duke Bushido said:

2 meters per hex.

 

We tend to do a lot of quick sketch ups for barious scenes, and it takes exactly half as much of the table as one meter per hex does.

technically, one quarter as much of the table.

If you don't come up with the details of your PC, then who will? Maybe the GM, if a detail needs to be decided upon after the fact, and maybe it'll be to your liking and maybe it won't. You never know what aspect of your character's life story is going to suddenly become relevant in game and the last thing I want is for the flow of the game to come to a screeching halt because somebody hasn't fleshed out their PCs background enough to keep the game going.

Sketch is a very simple superhero RPG where you draw your character and let the other players vote on what your stats/powers are, so you need to draw your character lifting something if you want them to be strong, or with speed lines if you want to be fast, etc.

Super Squadron is a superhero RPG from Australia published in the late 80s? I remember nothing about the game system, but I do recall that quite a lot of the interior artwork was traced from various sources.

Stuperpowers! is a comedic RPG about heroes with less than awesome powers.  Kind of the RPG if you wanted to play Legion of Substitute Heroes, I guess.

Underground was published by Mayfair in the early 90s and was set in a very grim and gritty superhero world. 

Project A-ko RPG was published in the mid 90s. The title character turned out to be hinted to be the daughter of Superman and Wonder Woman. There was speculation that her rival (B-ko) was Lex Luthor's daughter...

SuperWorld was the superhero portion of the Worlds of Wonder set. Designed by the recently passed Steve Perrin, it is credited with the inspiration of the Wild Cards universe.

Superhero 2044 the first superhero RPG ever.

Blood of Heroes from Pulsar Games used a system derived from the DC heroes system with its own setting

Tiny Supers is a minimalist superhero rpg based on the Tiny Heroes minimalist fantasy rpg.

Scion from White Wolf lets you play the offspring of various gods, which seems pretty much in line with main stream superheroics

On 8/14/2021 at 8:44 PM, tkdguy said:

Game designer and creator of Runequest Steve Perrin has passed away.

What really stings is that DunDraCon 44 was the last time I shared a game table with him. Had it happened, DDC 45 would have marked the 40th anniversary of Champions. (sort of) and there had been talk of trying to arrange a bunch of commemorative games and events to mark the occasion. Steve was in charge of DunDraCon's seminar scheduling and I'm sure something would have been arranged with hopefully a reunion of as many of the original Heroes as could be managed, but well, Coronavirus happened, so none of these plans panned out. DDC 45 was scheduled to be the first con back on the peninsula after a long stretch of events in Oakland and then San Ramon and it was going to be held at a hotel with much more capacity for attendees and events, too.

But what really bums me out as a Champions player is that Steve ran what was kind of an old timers game with a very limited invite list and anyone from the OG hero team the Guardians always had an invite. Whenever they were available, Dove and IceStar made fairly regular appearances and once in a while we got Marksman too. The players for Force and Gargoyle had passed away some time ago and the players for Rose and Mercenary were no longer in California. So DDC 45 marked the best opportunity to gather what remained the majority of the first hero team in Champions history and due to the pandemic, it didn't happen and now it probably never will.

Another thing I learned just recently - in the summer of 2019, Steve had a story published in Joker Moon, the latest collection of short stories set in the Wild Cards universe. The last convention we were at was in the spring of 2019, and while it hadn't hit the shelves yet, he had to have known that it was accepted and probably going through final edits prior to publication. He never mentioned it to us. He ran the seminars, he ran several Champions games. He was the most humble Secret Master of Gaming I ever knew.

about 30 years ago, I had just graduated from UCSC. I had played at Steve's table on a small handful of occasions, as he always welcomed visitors. He could run groups of up to a dozen without flinching. He was working as a technical writer and game designer at a computer game company at that time and when an opening in the art department came up, he got me an interview there and changed my life. I can't believe he's gone.

On 8/12/2021 at 2:48 PM, Ragitsu said:

Clearly, the man on the left is afraid of the unmasked man on the right and trying to encourage social distancing.

Sports team colors tend to feature color combinations that work well together. Many of the iconic team color combos are also used by iconic superheroes and/or villains.

12 hours ago, Derek Hiemforth said:

 

Let's say you have Flight 40m and you want to do an Immelman. To finish it you obviously need to turn 180 degrees, so you need to make three 60-degree turns. For simplicity's sake, I'd say you'd need to halve your movement distance for fighting gravity until you level off after the third 60-degree turn.

 

The first turn (presumably right after the start of your Phase) is "free," and now you have to halve your movement speed, then you have to move at least X meters before making the second turn, and then X more meters before making the third turn. After this, you no longer have to halve your movement speed.

 

Crunching some numbers, it comes out to needing to allocate 24m of movement distance to account for the halving that comes with climbing, leaving 16m unmodified for flying level after the Immelman. So the total distance traveled this Phase is going to be 28m (24m halves to 12m for climbing, plus 16m remaining of our original 40m = 28m).  That gives us a Turn Mode of 28/5 = 5.6, rounded to 6. So you make the first 60-degree turn, fly 6m up, turn again, fly 6m further up, turn the last time to level off, and fly 16m more.

 

All of that is for a Full Move.  If you only want to do a 20m Half Move, then it would be free turn, fly 3m up (which uses up 6m), turn and fly 3m further up (which uses up another 6m), then turn to level off and fly the remaining 8m for the half move (14m total distance moved / 5 = Turn Mode of 3).

 

So you're calculating turn mod based on the actual number of hexes moved, not the number of flight capacity used to achieve them? But how do you know how much  you need to move before turning if you haven't picked out your path yet and don't know how many actual hexes your path will stretch? What if you can't decide where you are turning because you can't see what's behind a wall you won't reach until your first turn? Is your turn mode 3 or 4? Might even be 5 if you fly downward.